Already at the beginning of her reign Elizabeth I was resolved to effect at the earliest opportunity both the restoration of the Royal Supremacy and the replacement of the Latin liturgy by an existing Edwardian Prayer Book. Constrained by Marian legislation which she was firmly minded not to break, the queen signalled her intentions by conspicuous adoption in her Chapel Royal of such few and minor manifestations of Protestant liturgy and practice as fortuitously were still legitimate, amplified by certain early Edwardian practices (1547–9) originally introduced not by statute but by proclamation or injunction and therefore never formally de-legitimated by statutory repeal. That her initial intention was restoration of the Prayer Book of 1549 is indicated by the identity of certain texts set to music early in 1559 by her Chapel Royal composers, and by the response of Edmund Guest to a contemporary request that he undertake a revision of parts of the 1549 Book. Arising from her own personal convictions, Elizabeth's policy was not without merits; however, political pragmatism and ecclesiastical realities coerced her into agreeing instead to the restoration of the Book of 1552. She exacted a number of concessions to her own conservatism ; first discernible in the instructions given to Guest, these achieved their realization through the rubrics of the 1559 Prayer Book and certain of the 1559 Injunctions.

Financing the crown was, perhaps, the seminal question in the English reign of James VI and I. Attempts to tap commercial wealth were a central feature of fiscal policy. The derivations of crown finance from commerce are straightforward; for instance, customs duties or concessions the crown held in monopolies and patents. The grandest project of James's reign, Alderman Cockayne's project to export dyed and dressed cloth, embodied these commercial-fiscal connections in addition to the goal of economic growth. The same points are exemplified by proposals to construct a fleet of fishing vessels (busses) with which to confront Dutch mastery of the trade. This project also enticed policy-makers and provides a vehicle through which to examine the relationship between crown finance and commerce, the revisionist approach to the structural failures of early Stuart government, and the politics of crown finance. The first section will trace the development of ‘projects’ and the conceptualization of crown finance as a project par excellence. The second section analyses specifically the busses projects. The final section examines the interaction of busses and fiscal policy in the 1610s. The argument is that the ultimate failure of finance was political rather than structural and the basis for this failure lay in the operation of Jacobean kingship upon policy-making.

The conventional picture of early Virginia suggests an almost exclusively male population, intent on personal profit, ruthlessly ignoring social considerations, lacking stability. This article argues that such a picture is an exaggeration, and draws attention to three communities, the inhabitants of which more closely resembled the rural English societies from which they had come. Particular attention is paid to the Neck of Land in Charles City, upriver from Jamestown close to the falls. The survival of administrative records makes possible an account of this small community between 1613 and 1629, revealing a hamlet of healthy married families whose concerns were sex, land, and status, rather than death and disease or the neighbouring Indian menace; and where stability in the 1620s did not, however, mean the absence of social tensions. Thus the Neck of Land, taken together with the communities at Point Comfort and on the Eastern Shore, demonstrates the inadequacy of current perceptions of early Virginian society.

Historians have tended to discuss the image (in the singular) of the monarch in early modern England. In the case of Charles I, the Eikon basilike, literally ‘the royal image’, presented a picture of the king that claimed to be stable and authoritative. This article argues rather that royal images were the product of multiple influences, and shifted through changing circumstances, rendering all images unstable and open to differing interpretations. Charles, as well as being the son of the Rex Pacificus, inherited the martial expectations associated with the image of his brother; and images of the prince and his early years as king in the 1620s continued alongside the changed representations of personal rule. Though the Eikon for a time seemed to fix Charles's image, its very authority meant that it was, after 1660, even after 1688, appropriated by all – whigs and tories as well as Jacobites. Most importantly, through the 30 January sermons, Charles's memory became a text which all parties needed and sought to claim, a text both shared and contested in the political culture.

The following attempts a modest reconsideration of one of the most well-known early modern Englishmen, Samuel Pepys. More precisely, the article suggests that much closer attention needs to be paid to Pepys's textuality (not sexuality). In modern times, his diary has achieved canonical status to the detriment of other texts scripted in unison with the famed Cambridge manuscript, now meticulously transcribed. Tracing the multiple textual transactions elided by the final manuscript allows for important insight into the diary's partiality. We need to resist, as much as possible, the temptation of contextualizing the diary with biographical detail because that detail is so often derived from the diary itself. We should reverse our interpretive strategy: begin with Pepys's texts (plural), unravel their main interconnections, and only then reach tentative conclusions about the man. Establishing motive is a risky business when there is no subject for interrogation. There is, however, a text that wants a more rigorous contextualization.

Letitia Bushe (c. 1705–57), daughter of a minor Irish landowner and one-time office- holder, was a member of the intellectual and cultural circle that included Swift's friend, the letter writer Mary Delany, the ‘proto-bluestocking’ Anne Donnellan, and the ‘heretic’ bishop Robert Clayton. The means by which, as a single woman of independent but limited means, Bushe maintained her position within this circle had elements of informal domestic servitude. At the same time a cache of unusually intimate letters reveals a determined individualist, consciously distancing herself from some of the official pieties of her society, and enjoying a greater freedom of thought, action, and speech than might at first sight have been expected. The letters also document Bushe's intense and tortured relationship with a younger woman, Lady Anne Bligh, an episode which raises important questions about the nature of women's friendships at this time.

The eighteenth-century commodifications of childhood and the sciences overlapped in the production of science books for children. This article examines a children's book written by two members of the Unitarian circle around Warrington Academy in the 1790s, and contrasts it with a Church of England work. The analysis reveals the extent to which religious differences could affect parental attitudes to the natural world, reason, the uses of the sciences, and the appropriate way to read and discuss books. Although the sciences were admitted as suitable for children, the issues of the subjects to be chosen, the purposes they were intended for, and the pedagogical methods by which they were presented, were still contested. This article also goes beyond the usual studies of children's books by focusing on non-fiction, and by emphasizing readers and use, rather than authors or publishers. Yet producing a history of reading based entirely on actual readers will be exceedingly difficult, so this article suggests an alternative, by combining accounts of actual readers' experiences with attitudes towards practices like orality and discussion.

By taking the Austrian province of Tyrol as a case-study, the article explores the relationship between Enlightenment, anti-Enlightenment, and national sentiments in and around the 1790s. Characterized by economic crisis and political turbulence, this period had profound consequences for the formation of national and regional identities amongst the region's German-speaking majority. In reaction to the challenges posed first by the centralist reforms in the Habsburg monarchy, and secondly the experience of the French Revolutionary Wars, the local nobility and clergy articulated a greater Tyrolian provincial consciousness, and also a stronger sense of their German identity. The mobilizing experience created by Tyrol's fight against the invading French armies meant that these sentiments were disseminated among and articulated by broader sections of the German-Tyrolian population as well. The article assesses the meanings and nuances of regional consciousness, local patriotism, German identity, and dynastic loyalty, and argues that national feeling in Tyrol was strongly influenced by anti-Enlightenment political and social forces.

This article gives chronology, nuance, and context to an analysis of how early socialist attitudes to religion changed. It asks why socialists argued with increasing fervour between the early 1830s and 1848 that social reform had to be rooted in spiritual as well as moral values. Two of the largest groups, the Icarians and the Fourierists, moved from a rational deism to Christianity. Both were driven by the need to defend themselves from accusations of immorality levelled against Fourier and the Saint-Simonians because of their rejection of monogamous marriage. The Fourierists, strongly influenced by their dominant female members, transformed Fourier's diety into a Christian God. Cabet, under pressure of ‘moral outrage’ from his critics, did likewise and found that this corresponded to the experiences of the Icarians in their artisan organizations. The religion of the early socialists was a democratic and a pragmatic morality, derived from artisan corporations, and seen as a vital base for fraternal association which was their solution to the ills of society.

This essay reviews the contribution of Foucauldian poststructural theory to history. It retrieves its origins as a supplement to, not a negation of, the structuralisms of the Annales. Histories of discourses influenced by modish (Barthesian, gender, post-colonial, Cultural Studies …) paradigms often overlook this heritage. They take, ‘il n'y a pas hors de texte’ at face value. This essay suggests ways to re-assimilate historical studies of discourses with older historiographies of classes, institutions, social structures, and ideologies. Poststructural historiography today tends to focus only on discourses, confusing coherence with power, meanings with causes. Making use of Giddens's structuration, de Certeau's reçu and Bourdieu's pratique, I suggest that historians must seek out actions as well as words, looking for sites where discourses they find in one sphere affect another. Only then can historians assess the importance of the discourses they find, above and beyond their mere coherence.

This review summarises the current state of knowledge and present trends in German historiography on the Third Reich. In Germany, assessment of the Nazi past has moved first from silence, and then from an emotionally charged engagement, to the more critical analyses of today. There has been a closer examination of the involvement of particular professional groups during the Nazi era, such as historians and lawyers. The ideological background of Hitler and the Nazi elite are being examined closely. Particular interest has also been shown in the ordinary aspects of living and coping in Hitler's Germany, the daily struggle and the moral dilemmas. An enormous interest in the German opposition against Hitler continues. In unified Germany, the memory of the struggle of the German resistance is kept alive in public consciousness as a positive line of continuity.

Historians have generally accepted the notion that Hitler's war against France was planned and conducted as a Blitzkrieg from the very beginning. Recent research, however, has shown the fallacy of this assumption by firmly establishing that Hitler and his generals expected the war in the West to become a re-enactment of the First World War. This review puts the new findings in military history in the context of other recent studies on Nazi plans to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ after the surprisingly fast victory over France. It links Nazi war and extermination planning with Hitler's underlying ideology and strategy and looks more closely at the still controversial Madagascar plan. One of the questions discussed is why there were no plans to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ under the cover of the war against France, a war expected to last for years.

Intertextual war: Edmund Burke and the French Revolution in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and James Mackintosh. By Steven Blakemore. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997. Pp. 256. ISBN 0-8386-3751-5. £32.

Radical expression: political language, ritual, and symbol in England, 1790–1850. By James Epstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. xi+233. ISBN 0-19-506550-6. £30.

Tom Paine: a political life. By John Keane. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Pp. xxii+644. ISBN 0-7475-2543-9. £8.99.

Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain. By H. L. Malchow. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+335. ISBN 0-8047-2664-7. £35 (hb). ISBN 0-8047-2793-7. £12.95 (pb).

Popular contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. By Charles Tilly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xvii+476. ISBN 0-674-68980-1. £31.50.

Radical culture: discourse, resistance and surveillance, 1790–1820. By David Worrall. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Pp. ix+236. ISBN 0-7450-0960-3. £40.

Most of these books are influenced by current philosophical or methodological concerns which might be labelled, according to taste, as poststructuralism, postmodernism, or the linguistic turn; but they are influenced to very varying degrees. At one end of the spectrum stands Tilly's substantial study, essentially modernist, rejecting the latest fashions. At the other stand the books by Blakemore and Malchow, their colours firmly nailed to the mast of deconstruction. Blakemore teaches in a department of English, and although Malchow's institutional affiliation is as an historian, his book is a hermeneutic of literary texts. The great majority of ‘postmodern’ analyses of texts from this period have come from the stable of literary studies, perhaps especially from scholars concerned, as Malchow is, with the construction of gender, that great growth area of the present time. None of these books subscribes in practice to a postmodern relativism, declaring itself to be merely a construction or representation of the past: all arrive at some kind of closure, explicitly or implicitly asserting the truth of their interpretations. Historians concerned to justify their subject to funding bodies may judge this to be prudent; nevertheless a greater degree of reflexivity, of self-doubt, would have been welcome in some instances, as we shall see.